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Creating crime, enriching criminals

Click the image to the right to view the Count the Costs crime briefing.

Far from eliminating drug use and the illicit trade, prohibition has inadvertently fuelled the development of the world’s largest illegal commodities market, estimated by the UN in 2005 to turn over more than $300 billion a year. Just as with US alcohol prohibition in the early 20th century, the profits flow untaxed into the hands of unregulated, often violent, criminal profiteers.

The negative consequences can be felt from the producer countries, where drug money fuels instability, conflict and corruption, through to the streets of Western consumer countries, which are blighted by warring drug gangs, street violence and high volumes of property crime committed by low-income, dependent users. This is over and above the criminalisation of hundreds of millions of consenting, non-violent adult drug users.

The trade is additionally undermining the international financial system through money laundering and placing an intolerable burden on overstretched criminal justice systems and overflowing prisons across the world.

The UK government has estimated that over 50% of property crime is committed by dependent heroin and cocaine users to fund their habits(1)

In 1989, Forbes magazine listed Colombian cocaine dealer Pablo Escobar as the seventh richest man on earth, with a personal fortune of over $9 billion

The UN estimates that there are currently over 200 million illegal drug users,(2) most criminalised purely because of their use

"The control system and its application have [created] a huge criminal black market ... There is no shortage of criminals competing to claw out a share of a market in which hundred fold increases in price from production to retail are not uncommon."

The full OAS analytical report provides a a groundbreaking visualization of alternatives to the existing regime – in the form of four scenarios of how drug policy and law could develop between now and 2025.

Here the former Mexican president (outgoing at the time of article), Felipe Calderon, argues that the drug trade is impossible to end. He claims that the U.S. has a responsibility to the moral issue of the power and money that their drug consumption gives criminals in Mexico and focuses on this as the biggest part of the Mexican War on Drugs.

Addresses the way the war on drugs has driven the HIV/AIDS pandemic among those who use drugs and their sexual partners. One of the ways in which this happens is that throughout the World the war on drugs has driven users away from public health services and into environments where there is a high risk of contracting HIV.

This BBC article suggests that many innocent civilians are dying as a result of the war being waged against drug cartels in Mexico. There are also accusations of corruption, as the true number of deaths are covered up by both the police and the government.